Wildfires can cause costly long-term treatment issues by challenging coagulant dosing, filtration effectiveness, and disinfection efficacy, elevating disinfection by-product formation, and increasing bioavailable phosphorus leading to cyanobacterial/algal blooms and requiring algal toxin removal. Overall, these challenges may last for several years or more.

• Providing guidance in advance of a treatment crisis.
• Creating treatment resilience assessment frameworks for wildfire-impacted source waters based on bench- and pilot-scale testing that provide operational and design considerations.
• Prioritizing what changes can most easily be made within the treatment process to respond to wildfire impacts and still meet regulatory, public health, and production requirements.